They don’t just add to a brand’s credibility. They bring together people with shared passions and purpose.
A fifth key topic in the book Owning Game-Changing Subcategories is brand communities that are enabled or enhanced by websites and social media. A major and often overlooked contribution of digital to business strategy is brand communities—groups of people that bond because of shared interest or passion in something connected to a brand.
Consider, for example, the community experience of the buyers and sellers on Etsy. They bond with each other through crafting and homemade goods, and with Etsy and its supporting programs. The affinity is strong and lasting and provides an Etsy “must-have.”
What Brand Communities Offer
People hunger for connection and a brand community delivers. Brand communities have been around forever. The Harley Owners Group (HOG) was founded in 1983. However, digital technology has radically enhanced the power and relevance of communities, allowing the membership base to quickly expand geographically and demographically by leveraging digital tools not available to HOG members of the early ‘80s.
“People hunger for connection and a brand community delivers.”
A brand community can be offering-focused, centered around the buying and using experience. That was the case for communities formed at Salesforce.com (where members seek to improve their use of the Salesforce.com software), at LEGO (where LEGO builders interact) and at the Marriott Vacation Club (with members who live for travel and to experience the Marriott vacation options).
If a brand lacks an offering-driven following, it may develop a shared interest that fits the brand to form the locus of a community. That was the case at the Sephora Beauty Insider (which centers on skincare and beauty), Nike Run Club (work-out programs) and the Dove “self-esteem” movement (a shared passion for inner beauty). Such communities also can lead to social benefits created by the involvement of like-minded customers.
How Brand Communities Help Exemplar Brands
Brand communities help exemplar brands and their subcategories by:
Creating or enhancing a brand relationship. When an exemplar brand is involved as an active partner with an activity that is important to a customer, it provides a relationship that could not be obtained by communicating functional benefits of an offering. A person has a special affinity for others that share his or her passion, goals and activities. If the brand is associated with that interest, it too will be highly regarded. When a community helps to represent a person’s identity, its impact is magnified.
Adding energy, visibility and involvement. These are critical elements of brand-building that are difficult to achieve using conventional media and methods. Every time a person interacts with the community, the brand is rewarded with some energy and visibility, accentuated because a person initiated the interaction, not the brand.
Providing credibility to members and brand partners. For many, online communities may feel like a grouping of valued and trusted friends. As a result, the information sourced from the community is not seen as biased, phony or self-serving. Further, the brand gains credibility because it is no longer a seller but is, instead, “one of us.”
Becoming a barrier to competitors. An exemplar brand that has created a brand community that can regularly involve the customer with a shared interest often will earn a core group of customers with a high affinity toward the brand. Those customers will be hard for competitors to attract.
Sourcing new or enhanced product/service ideas and evaluating these ideas. Being involved in product/service development and refinement provides useful and timely information to the brand team and a feeling of being an active part of the community for the customers.
Brands that encourage communities grow and achieve relevance faster, uniting like-minded people around shared passion points. Whether it’s cooking, fitness or gaming, communities help people belong to something larger.
In times of uncertainty, our research probes what makes some leaders feel strong while others struggle.
37 min
As organizations face difficult choices in response to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, Charlene Li, author of The Disruption Mindset and senior fellow at Altimeter, a Prophet company, discusses the strategies business leaders can deploy during disruptive times in her webinar series, “Leading in Times of Crisis”. Watch the replays and access the presentation slides for the webinars “How to be a Strong Leader in Times of Crisis”, “Operating in the New Normal” and “Creating a Culture Capable of Thriving with Disruption.”
How to be a Strong Leader in Times of Crisis
Watch the webinar replay to learn about five ways to help leaders navigate these trying times. Presentation slides can be accessed here. Please feel free to share and utilize with Attribution to Altimeter.
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Leading in Times of Crisis: Operating in the New Normal
Watch the webinar replay for insights on what leaders should do and how they can prepare for operating successfully in a post-crisis world. Slides from the webinar are available here.
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Creating a Culture Capable of Thriving with Disruption
Watch the webinar replay to learn about the key principles a disruptive organization can deploy to create a culture of change. Webinar slides are available here for download.
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Learn more about how Altimeter and Prophet can help you and your organization. Our offerings include:
Sustained, profitable growth is increasingly uncommon for B2B companies as they face changing market dynamics and the threat of digital disruption. This book guides B2B leaders along a step-by-step path to uncommon growth through three transformative shifts:
The Digital Selling Shift to digital demand generation
The Digital Experience Makeover to digital customer engagement
The Digital Proposition Pivot to data-powered, digital solutions
Prioritizing customers over technology is the key to success.
The current paradigm of technology-led transformation is a recipe for failure. Successful digital transformation puts technology at the service of customers.
Rich case studies from Maersk, Michelin, Adobe and Air Liquide with best practices from IBM, Salesforce.com, Johnson & Johnson, ThyssenKrupp, and scores of leading B2B companies to illustrate in this book how putting customers at the heart of digital transformation drives uncommon growth.
“This book illuminates the secret sauce of digital transformation in the B2B space: the thrust should come from customers and how digital could improve their experience and relationship with the brand.”
Dr. Lars Brzoska Chairman of the Board of Management, Jungheinrich AG
“This is a great guide to applying best practices to the formidable challenge of digital transformation in complex markets and supply chains. It provides the tools leaders need to move ahead.”
Lindy Hood Chief Customer Experience Officer, Zurich Financial North America
“By providing case examples and step by step assistance in determining where to play, how to win, what to do and who to win, this book fulfilled my need for inspiring and pragmatic transformation guidance.”
About the Authors
Fred Geyer is a senior partner at Prophet. He has helped B2B clients in the financial services, healthcare, and technology industries – including Zurich Financial, AXA, Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices, Medtronic, and Avery Dennison – undertake customer-first transformations and address the challenges of digital disruption. Fred’s prior experience as president of Crayola Canada and chief marketing officer, North America, of Electrolux Floor Care, enables him to bring a practitioner’s perspective to making digital transformation work in the real world.
Joerg Niessing is a member of the faculty at INSEAD and is a globally recognized expert and strategic advisor on digital transformation, digital strategy, customer-centricity, and data analytics. He is the program director of INSEAD’s flagship programs “B2B Marketing Strategies” and “Leading Digital Marketing Strategy.” Over the past five years, Joerg has engaged with more than 3,000 executives from a wide range of companies in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia, including Google, Kone, Roche, Maersk, Michelin, IBM, Thales, PwC, and Kion. Joerg’s prior experience as head of Prophet’s Insight and Analytics practice, along with his previous work as a marketing data scientist, inform his insights on ensuring that digital transformations are data-driven, customer-centric, and drive sustainable growth.
Connect
Want to speak to Fred about how to become more consumer-centric and implement the essential shifts needed to unlock growth? Contact us today. And if you’re a leader looking for more insights into the B2B sector then visit the B2B Digital Transformation resource hub here.
Adjusting Your Marketing Priorities: Levers You Can Pull
Targeting, messaging, content and sharper value propositions can all trigger growth.
This is a time for every organization to re-examine its priorities for the next few weeks and even the next few quarters. Your customers’ needs, your partners, your employees, the world overall. Marketers, in particular, may choose to shift messaging, spend or delay initiatives, but it doesn’t mean to stop communicating—or to stop leading. Now’s the time to find your voice, demonstrate empathy and reinforce relationships you’ve worked hard to build. This is marketing’s time, so let’s take a look at how to adjust your marketing priorities.
Every Choice Should Flow from How You Can Help
Take this time to reflect on how you can help, and then take action. Help both your customers and employees acknowledge and manage their primary fear: staying healthy and keeping loved ones safe. Support them by providing structure and ways to fill time. Encourage them to connect to one another. Provide ways to practice gratitude for those guiding us through this. And finally, help people remember we will persevere.
Tapping Your Existing Marketing Skillset
While we haven’t experienced a moment exactly like this before, through our work helping clients transform their marketing strategies we can identify at least eight levers every marketer has, and shifts one might make now:
Value Prop: Revisit what you offer and supplement with a service, incentive and channel distribution that could make a difference and be relevant in this moment. Universal shifted distribution channels, accelerating shift of in-theatre releases to online rentals.
Pricing:Sensitive to customer needs, you might cut prices, waive fees, or offer rebates. Seamless removed delivery fees, instead giving them to drivers. CreativeLive made streaming health and wellness classes free. Burger King is offering free kids meals with purchase via its app. It’s promotional, but one can argue it helps parents joyously feed their kids.
Targeting: While your plan may have had a customer acquisition posture, this might be a better time to refocus on your core: existing customers who know you and need you more than ever. Is there a special group of people or need state you can demonstratively help?
Messaging: Refresh your messaging to focus on relevance, perhaps with customer updates on what the brand (and your people) are doing during the crisis. Ford replaced national product advertising with a coronavirus-response campaign, which includes mention of payment relief.
Content: Information, entertainment and utility all can be powerful levers. How can you serve the primary need of staying healthy, while managing anxieties about finances, need for everyday supplies, and many other general uncertainties that will be with us in the coming months? Many brands are shifting their services and are offering up support in open, honest – ultimately very helpful – ways. Zola, a go-to resource for wedding planning has provided updates and resources for couples whose weddings will potentially be affected as well as set up a hotline. Is there a timely video, article series or ebook that will help solve a customer need?
Spend: Pressured for cost savings or for an inappropriate context, you may drastically cut media or sales promotion spend. What will you do with those funds? We also expect to see shifts in media buys to reaching people at home including digital display, social, direct mail, TV, and video including OTT.
Measurement: Re-evaluate what matters and what success will look like. Put raw revenue and profit in context with human costs, reputation and relationship metrics. What you do for customers and employees has the potential for amplification via media and social more than ever.
Team Organization: Is your marketing team set up for this situation? How is the relationship and coordination with corporate communications, service, sales and product? Do quick pivots need to be made? Notice any skill gaps and needs to shift roles towards better listening and faster servicing.
“Now’s the time to find your voice, demonstrate empathy and reinforce relationships you’ve worked hard to build.”
Whether you are re-evaluating your marketing across one, five, or all of the above measures, remember this is a shifting situation. It’s important to be agile yet calm. Steadfast and strategic.
If you need help prioritizing which levers to pull, and what your moves might be? We’re here to help. Drop your questions, or ideas, into the comments or reach out directly here.
Grit, empathy, generosity and fierceness–these scary times are eliciting some of humanity’s best traits.
A Letter from Prophet CEO Michael Dunn
Like many others, we at Prophet are intensely focused on the rapid rise of COVID-19. And as this virus spreads in new and unexpected ways, our first concerns are–of course–for human safety.
Our worst fears are the most intimate. We’re worried about our own health and protecting our families, especially the very old and the very young. And we’re increasingly concerned with the well-being of those in all our communities. Coworkers. Neighbors. Clients. Friends. Family at a distance.
As the days continue, many of us are facing other fears. Ones focused on financial security – the health of our businesses and the livelihoods of our teams. Many of us are trying not to voice that concern when lives are on the line. But it is there – and for those of us who guided businesses through the economic upheaval of 2008, 2001, or even the early ‘90s and ‘80s, we understand that now more than ever, it is imperative to be a strong leader to help our organizations survive, and maybe even thrive.
Leading in the face of disruption requires a mix of characteristics that are difficult to harness, even when your business is at its strongest. Grit and empathy. Agility and decisiveness. Creativity and rigor. Generosity and fierceness. We need to bring our “A” game each moment, inspiring and drawing inspiration from teams all around us. If we can, we will all find a way through this, together.
“When you find yourself drifting, draw on your strengths and lean into a growth mindset.”
For more than 20 years, we have been studying how organizations, brands and leaders source growth in the face of disruption. Growth that is purpose-led, innovative, relevant and sustaining. By leaning into our organization’s core values and capabilities, by listening hard to our customers and stakeholders and by understanding how their rapidly shifting contexts are creating new needs, we are finding better ways to serve. We are charting new paths.
We’re already starting to embrace new innovations and shifts. Special shopping hours for seniors, take-out 5-star meals, the explosion of telemedicine and distance learning, yoga streamed “live”, 3-D printing hackathons to backfill medical device shortages: these hopeful responses are unfolding all around us. Pay attention to these actions that speak to the spirit of humanity, the impact of selfless business and the power of collaborative ingenuity.
When you find yourself drifting, draw on your strengths and lean into a growth mindset. Human-centered, digitally powered, purpose-led – find your way to emerge from the Covid-19 crisis stronger and more confident than ever.
Five Ways to Be a Strong Leader in Disruptive Times
During disruption, stability and security are important. So are openness and transparency.
Like many of you, the events of the past few weeks have thrown me flat on my butt. My heart goes out to the many people who are dealing with COVID-19 in their families or have lost their jobs. And my soul grieves for the pain that is yet to come.
This past Fall, I published my latest book, The Disruption Mindset, and drawing upon that research, as well as over two decades of studying disruption, I’ve learned that disruption creates opportunities for change. That’s because when a disruption happens, our sense of normal is torn apart into pieces and thrown into the air. The people who thrive with disruption jump into the air to catch the pieces before they fall. Those who duck their heads and hope not to get hit will become the victims of disruption.
My hope is that people will leap high with courage and conviction so that they can be the disruptive leaders we so desperately need in the coming days. Anybody can be a leader because it doesn’t require a title. Rather, a leader is simply someone who sees the opportunity for change and takes action to rally people to that cause.
I want to share five ways you can be the best leader possible in these trying times.
Develop a disruption mindset
Establish stability and security with structure and process
Use openness and transparency to create accountability
Communicate in 3D to nurture relationships
Identify opportunities for the future
1. Develop a Disruption Mindset
Let’s be honest, it’s hard to know where to head with such chaos going on. Personally, I feel whipsawed between dealing with family issues to answering text messages from clients and team members. It’s hard to focus your efforts on things that really matter and effectively manage the noise.
In researching The Disruption Mindset, I surveyed over 1,000 leaders globally and found that an individual most able to thrive with disruption possess a mindset that is both open to change and embodies the leadership behaviors that empower and inspire others. These disruptive leaders are called “Realist Optimists” in that they see the opportunity being created but are realistic about what actions need to be taken today.
At this point, you may have already had to make some tough decisions with your organization just to get through the past week. You likely won’t know the answers as your team asks, “What do we do now?”.
But it’s not your job to have all the answers. Your job as a leader is to ask the right questions – to focus your team on the work to be done. Your job as a leader is to connect with other leaders in your network to fill in the gaps of your knowledge and experience. Your job as a leader is to keep the process moving forward so that together you all find the path forward.
Use this as an opportunity to change your perspective of what it means to lead an organization. Last August, the Business Roundtable redefined the purpose of a corporation from being solely around increasing the value to shareholders to also creating value for customers, employees, suppliers and the community. I can’t think of a better time than now to create new frameworks, metrics and best practices around what this looks like.
Being a disruptive leader requires that you have the courage and conviction to step out of your comfort zone. Courage is when you don’t know what the outcome is going to be, yet you still move forward into that uncertainty. We need courageous, disruptive leaders in these crazy times.
2. Establish Stability and Security with Structure and Process
This new normal requires new norms, especially for leaders now working with suddenly distributed teams. For example, distributed teams communicate, connect and form relationships in vastly different ways from in-person teams. Simply transferring your office protocols isn’t going to work. In a time of crisis, more information sharing is needed.
When you can no longer manage by walking around, you will need to substitute it with daily standups and weekly check-ins. Formalizing what was previously informally done creates a structure and process that will benefit your business because it ensures that everyone is aligned around your strategic goals.
Given the current crisis, traditional meetings may not make sense when people are juggling childcare and working from home. One leader I spoke with made it clear that having a toddler in a lap or a cat walking across a desk was completely acceptable given the circumstances.
Another organization decided to do away with scheduled meetings because it was too stressful for parents to make sure that they were available for a specific time. Instead, they used digital platforms to gather, organize and make decisions in an asynchronous manner. As needed, team members held unscheduled chats or posted feedback over a set time period (typically 24 hours) to move decisions forward.
Lastly, decide on the tools that you are going to use to get work done. RingCentral found that many workers waste up to an hour a day navigating between enterprise apps; so minimize the number of apps that you use. One important process to define is how people will message each other – will it be by email or another platform like Slack or Teams or WhatsApp? Designate one messaging platform that you will use, one place to share documents and one collaborative project management e tool.
You will need to develop your own protocols that work for your organization. The key is to be very clear on how work is going to be done so that you remove uncertainty and confusion.
Use this disruptive time as an opportunity to build agility, flexibility and accountability into your culture and work habits. Make disruption work in your favor as you create stability and security out of new practices and beliefs.
3. Use Openness and Transparency To Create Accountability
To build trust with both your customers and employees, it is important to have one single source of truth that is known by all. Take the time to lay out how you will share information and decisions in a transparent way.
“You will need to develop your own protocols that work for your organization. The key is to be very clear on how work is going to be done so that you remove uncertainty and confusion.”
One leader I spoke with realized that only the leadership team had access to key company data on their collaboration platform, but that the team would benefit from seeing and using it. Except for a small amount of confidential information, they made everything accessible to the entire organization. Openness in information sharing ensures that everyone knows what is going on, giving them the security to be able to make decisions quickly.
To that end, encourage people to share information and decisions in the open. If you can’t physically see each other getting work done, then you need to tell each other what you are working on. Transparency creates trust, security and stability.
4. Communicate In 3D To Nurture Relationships
By all means, over-communicate in a time of crisis. Nokia Chairman, who guided the company through the sale of their handset business and its pivot into an Internet communications telecom giant, said, “No news is bad news. The bad news is good news. Good news is no news.” Rather than dribble out bad news slowly, deliver it with compassion and empathy as soon as you can. It’s far worse imagining the bad news than to receive it and then be able to take the necessary next steps.
Communicate in “3D,” using every channel available – email, video recordings, Slack, social media and Teams and WhatsApp. It also means using video to make calls. There’s nothing like being able to see each other to develop that connection, rather than a disembodied voice on the phone. Video also creates accountability – you can confirm that the other person is present and focused on the conversation and with you.
Another dimension is looking at communications from the perspective of being “Remote First.” Instead of thinking of remote as a second-best alternative to being face to face, think of it as the default going forward. Even when you go back to your office, keep the processes that work for distributed workers so that it makes sense for both modalities.
Lastly, your communications must also establish a new culture for this new normal. Without the serendipity of running into someone in the lunchroom, you will need to engineer serendipity by designating areas where people are encouraged to share and discuss non-work topics. From sharing pictures of their work area at home to jokes and memes, invest in this connective social tissue to help your team connect and continue to build their relationships. It’s these casual encounters that build trust.
5. Identify Opportunities for The Future
The final area is thinking about future opportunities. My research found that disruptive leaders and their organizations do one thing extremely well: they focus on the needs of their future customers. This is truer than ever in these disruptive times. It may be tempting to go back to existing customers and try to coax them to come back to you. But just as importantly, you must think about where new customers with emerging needs are going to be.
As an example, here’s a figure that maps the U.S. GDP growth rate over the last five years. You can see that times of recession and crisis resulted in great creativity and innovation. Microsoft was founded in the midst of the oil crisis of the 70s. Apple launched the iPod in 2001 after the dot.com bust. And Airbnb and Uber were founded in the depths of the last recession in 2008 and 2009, respectively.
Disruption today is creating a need not just for innovation, but also for ingenuity. The need hasn’t gone away with the shuttering of businesses – it’s instead shifted and if you can shift with the need, you can fill the gap.
Multiple examples of ingenuity have surfaced in the past few days. For example, some closed schools rerouted school buses to deliver meals to home-bound kids. In Ireland, small business AMI refurbished high-quality laptops from companies to meet a demand to rent or buy laptops for working from home employees. And my personal favorite is seeing trainers and yoga instructors bringing their clients together on Zoom calls – it’s gratifying to see my fellow class members also struggling to catch their breath!
As a leader, you can find the next disruption opportunity by aligning yourself and your entire team around understanding the needs of the emerging customer. Instead of asking, “What can I do?”, ask instead, “How can I best serve?”
Here are three ways to better identify and understand your future customer. First, use empathy maps to better understand how these people feel, what they say, what they think and what they do (below is an example empathy map from my book). Deepen your understanding of how they approach a problem or situation.
Second, create a Customer Advisory Board (CAB). It can provide you with insight and feedback on what you are doing well and how you could serve their needs better. Don’t stack your CAB with your biggest and best current customers. Instead, find the customers who push you to do things in a different way. Ask your sales and customer services teams who the most insightful customers are – the ones who challenge the way your company works. These customers will hold you to a higher standard.
A strong CAB will push you further and faster than anything you can come up with. Having concrete examples of what future customers want is a powerful antidote to stuck-in-today thinking.
Lastly, find your customer-obsessed people. Seek out the people in your organization who are already naturally inclined to think about your customers. You likely already know who they are. They walk in customers’ shoes and intuitively understand their pain points. When you find these customer-obsessed people, give them the social proof that their opinions, not only matter but are being heard and are making a difference.
For example, one organization routinely highlights call center staff at monthly team meetings who have not only surfaced a problem from a service call but also taken the initiative to push through a change in product or policy. Recognizing the advocacy that addresses a customer’s needs turns that person into a hero to be emulated, encouraging others to surface the voices of customers.
Every Step Is the First Step on The Disruption Journey
I wish I could promise that the journey ahead is smooth sailing. It’s going to be anything but. That’s what disruption is – it forces us out of our comfort zone and makes us come face to face with our biggest doubts and fears. But if you can look past them to the opportunities to serve created by disruption, you and your team will have a focus that will steady your hand.
Today, you can decide to take the first step on the disruption path. And given the difficulties, every step will feel like the first step all over again. But trust and believe that you are on the journey, which will be so much better than staying mired in the past.
A Perspective on Adapting to the New Normal of COVID-19
How flexibility, self-care and thinking like a first-grader are helping us find our way.
If you’ve listened to global news channels these past few days, you’ve likely heard the word “unprecedented” more than you can count. In Asia, we’ve been hearing similar language for over eight weeks as the COVID-19 outbreak took shape in our region. I fully realize that everyone’s personal and professional situations are unique, but I hope that there might be a nugget or two from my experience that will be helpful as people around the world begin to navigate this unprecedented crisis for the first time.
Here’s some advice for navigating COVID-19:
Stay connected
One of the most important things about working is the opportunity to build personal connections with like-minded individuals. Never underestimate the importance of the small casual interactions that happen in the office every day. It is not easy to fully replicate the in-person experience while working remotely; however, there are several tools and resources – Zoom, WeChat, Whatsapp—that can help you stay connected. Do not only use these tools to carry out “business as usual,” use video capabilities to check in with your colleagues on a personal level. This situation is new for everyone and everyone’s personal situation is different, so a quick call to ask, “How are you doing today?” goes a long way in someone’s day. In the end, we will get through this situation better together than on our own.
Be flexible
Flexibility is obviously very relevant for us as individuals as we learn how to adapt to a remote working environment, but it is even more important in the context of working together. Understanding that everyone’s situation is a little bit different and showing a willingness to flex your own schedule to accommodate your colleagues and clients will make it easier for everyone on your team to survive, and even thrive, in this new normal situation.
“We will get through this situation better together than on our own.”
Lean into the unfamiliar
Every day you will be faced with new challenges about how to conduct your work while needing to be physically separate. Our teams at Prophet have been able to conduct virtual whiteboarding sessions and hold fun and interactive weekly all-hands meetings and social experiences. All of this came from the team’s willingness to embrace the unfamiliar and apply our best creative thinking to designing a new way forward.
Add your home duties to your schedule
When we are at work, we are all controlled by our meetings calendar. At home, you will need to balance multiple demands – whether it be your children at home from school closings and roommates working in close quarters. Schools in Hong Kong have been closed since the last week of January and all of us with kids have needed to juggle new home-schooling duties alongside our regular work. In my family, I was responsible for the home-schooling duties of our 6-year-old son. What worked best for me was scheduling time for my “second job” into my day. Every day from 3-5:30 p.m. I would pause my work to teach Reading, Writing and Math. Did that mean that some of my work was pushed into the evening? Yes. Did this experience bring me even closer to my son? Definitely! Do I have a newfound appreciation for Grade 1 teachers? ABSOLUTELY!
Take time to recharge yourself
There is no denying that what we are all experiencing is stressful so don’t forget to take care of your own well-being. You may even find it helpful to add some time to take care of your personal health during the day, especially if you are trying to work from home while your kids are off from school.
While working remotely and from home will feel strange and unfamiliar for a week or two, it will soon become more familiar. Business professionals around the world will come out of this situation with new skills and a new appreciation for one another.
Build intimacy with the right use of introductions, video and interaction.
The Lay of the Land
As companies become more global, cost pressures mount, and, more recently, global risks including COVID-19 flood the news, meetings are succumbing to the need to keep attendees safe – whether that’s high-profile public events such as SXSW, or large internal meetings, such as Google’s I/O Conference.
“How do we bring people together for important meetings without having them in person?”
Organizations are being forced to ask – how do we bring people together for important meetings without having them in person? The answer goes beyond simply taking a meeting and adding a conference line or a video conference link. It requires an expanded use of tools and technologies, thoughtful preparation and reinforcement of the objectives of a session.
Our Roadmap
Important meetings, whether a brainstorming workshop, alignment session, or even global town halls are critical to build relationships and familiarity amongst attendees, enable collaboration and create meaningful experiences. Too often, these objectives can be missed in the process of going virtual – particularly for larger-scale meetings or collaborative work sessions.
Here are some best practices from our work with both virtual and in-person events:
Step 1: Prepare the agenda and content with different perspectives:
Take a broader view: Recognize the realities of your attendees – balancing the time zones, languages and cultural norms of where people are. While you may have more control in a live setting where everyone is together, it is important to virtually meet individuals where they are and be clear, concise and respectful of different cultures.
Set the stage. Ensuring participants are in the right headspace and environment can help people remain engaged. Be sensitive to more abnormal environments, while still providing clear instructions from the onset, whether it be asking people to be in a quiet space or sharing the agenda with built in bio breaks. As more and more individuals are asked to work from home and manage kids who may not be in school, you will have to think about the different types of work environments that will come with these changes.
Get the right tools:. Ensure all participants have access to the right tools – ask them to download to their systems and ensure they have access prior to the start time. As a backup, send materials as separate attachments in case streaming access becomes an issue. Consider what other tools your team needs to collaborate in an ongoing way, whether that be Microsoft Teams, Slack, or WeChat to enable virtual connections.
Step 2: Instill a sense of humanity by creating ways to connect:
Don’t forget introductions. To break through the barriers of distance, it is important to incorporate ways to build rapport amongst attendees. This can be done by allowing attendees to share names, locations, and fun facts, or providing bios beforehand. Prompts that are forward looking (what are you looking forward to this summer?) or provoke thoughtful discussion related to the topic (what was your first job?) help build deeper connections.
Video, Video, Video! Making sure attendees are using video establishes a human connection. Video allows you to read others’ facial expressions, encourages attendees to actively participate by holding them accountable and helps to reduce multitasking. Screensharing can also help keep people, literally, on the same page.
Create intimacy through other channels. In live meetings, there are often breakout groups or sidebars that provide ways for attendees to discuss topics in-depth. By using virtually run events, you can enable focused conversation by breaking participants into smaller groups via Zoom or encourage people to submit questions or comments through a shared channel, enabling participants to express thoughts or questions without disruption.
Step 3: Facilitate interaction and collaboration:
Separate process and content roles. Frequently, well-run meetings have separate roles for process and participation. In other words, they have a professional facilitator. When working virtually, even in smaller group meetings, it’s best to have someone designated to focus on the process: guiding the group towards the required outcomes. The individual responsible for process should also be responsible for recapping all decisions and next steps to reduce any risk of confusion over what was agreed upon.
Utilize digital collaboration tools. There are many digital tools available to facilitate this collaboration—many of which make engaging with peers online even more effective than in-person. Polling tools such as Menti can allow for real-time group alignment (i.e., which of these ideas do you like best?), or brainstorming and planning tools like Mural for active, real-time co-creation when building out new concepts. These tools also enable more voices to be heard, leading to more impactful results as more ideas can be put forward and synthesized faster.
Consider breaking sessions into smaller parts: Extended virtual collaboration can be exhausting – consider if your meeting can be divided into smaller segments to allow for greater engagement, more time to evolve thinking between sessions and the ability to modulate for what the meeting needs.
Step 4: Create meaningful experiences to drive content home:
Create meaningful experiences to drive content home. Inspire thoughtful experiences. During a virtual meeting, mechanisms such as a digital gallery that participants click through or pre-recorded videos can excite attendees – creating a space for them to engage in the content in meaningful ways.
Consider the full journey. Think about ways to excite attendees before a session with an “Inspiration Dose” to spark thinking or an “Inspiration Suitcase” with artifacts that relates to the topic. Inspiration doses can be as easy as sending a link to a video, a brief story or an article to get attendees to think in new ways. Following the meeting, virtual touchpoints such as a post-read, microsites or digital training courses can be critical to reinforcing the content.
Maintain the energy. Reading the room can be tough over virtual platforms, so take the extra effort to check in on how attendees are doing and build in energizers as necessary. Riddles, brain teasers and even physical challenges can raise energy levels. For example, try asking attendees to rip a piece of paper it into the shape of an elephant (or any shape) behind their back. Compare shapes and declare a winner!
While virtual events may feel mandatory during times of travel restrictions, budget cuts or other forces, preparing for virtual meetings can also allow businesses to stay nimble and connected. Like any important health-related concern, remember, organizational preparation is key!
Why courage–a trait long discouraged by many companies–is now an essential component of cultural change.
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
– William Faulkner
A System of Fear
Following the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the pendulum of decision making swung firmly to conservatism and the avoidance of risk became the key focus for many industries and organizations. Many would say it was long overdue but it was a relatively binary and extreme reaction. It led to a nervousness to act and a clampdown on experimental activity in many quarters. Armies of people were hired, especially in financial institutions, to hard-wire risk avoidance into their processes and systems. This also surfaced in many other industries outside of financial services, with systemic fear not only preventing people and organizations from stepping forward and innovating but paralyzing daily progress through red tape and lack of decision making.
Fear-driven protectionism is not a modern phenomenon, in fact, it’s natural. From our prehistoric origins, we’ve relied on survival instincts, humans have barely evolved beyond their preponderance to scan their environment continually for threats. Yes, we all seek reward but we are much more motivated by loss aversion. Our brains have roughly five times the receptors for threat as we do for reward. This leads us all to constantly look for comfort and familiarity because that is more likely to lead to survival. Humans are also influenced by the group they belong to (read organization here) and the need to continue to belong to the group. Building systems of risk avoidance helps conservatism take hold and the tendency to slow down spreads at the speed of light.
We Need Courage, Not Heroes
It takes courage to break out of that cycle. You have to be brave to take a risk and swim against the organizational tide. Most definitions of leadership include a notion of being at the front, bringing others into a new reality. It’s vital to be clear on what you are doing, where you are going and why, especially if you are going to take a leap forward and risk personal and professional capital on your ‘unusual’ decisions and actions. As Nelson Mandela learned: “Courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” Unfortunately, courageous behavior often becomes riskier for leaders the more senior they get. They have more to lose. And consequently, fear rises.
Courage is not a new phenomenon in leadership but we don’t see it as a prominent focus in many organizations today – it’s seemingly lacking from many organizational values or leadership behaviors. Perhaps because we are trying to get away from the traditional, machismo image of a hero leader – so often portrayed as male – courage is not fashionable today. That’s a shame because now is the time that we need it most. Now and in the future.
Courage in leadership can be about being part of a team. It can be about backing other people to give their ideas traction – it doesn’t have to be about direct personal delivery. We often put our favorite sports teams on a pedestal because of the courage they demonstrate in fighting together to the end against their arch-rivals and being able to win as a team on the biggest stages, under unbelievable pressure.
Courage Is a Core Competency for Leaders
In 2018, research for one of our global clients into the requirements to lead their transformation journey revealed the missing link to being courageous. They knew the changes ahead would be difficult and instilling the courage in their leadership and culture was central to raising performance, increasing accountability and driving greater innovation. Equipping leaders with the techniques and permission to show bravery and listen fearlessly is playing a significant part in their turnaround story.
In today’s world of constant change and digitization, leadership is becoming even more important. Our 2019 global research examining the cultural levers for growth demonstrated that in digital transformations, leadership’s role is elevated to be even more fundamental than during a traditional transformation. In fact, building a culture of empowerment and innovation came in the top three priorities for transforming the employee experience – an increase of 65% from the previous year. The transformational levers we uncovered that related most to leadership were setting the ambition and roadmap, role modeling, aligning incentives to break down silos and pushing decision rights downwards – each requiring courage to challenge the status quo, push forward, stay the course and trust others to deliver. And all of these create very uncomfortable situations for a leader to face.
A Culture of Bold Moves
What can you do to build courage into your leadership cadre, your change leadership, and your entire organization? Most of our leadership work is in transformation leadership. There is no silver bullet. The answer lies in the specifics of your situation and ambition. However, there are three things that set the foundations for courage:
Coupling purpose with ambition so that your transformation has a clear meaning and a North Star – making it easier to be brave in pursuit of it.
Equipping leaders with mechanisms to be bold, for instance, developing personalized trigger plans where they focus on their style, their routine and their big decision-making moments, enabling them to prepare for and be courageous at key moments.
Focus on a culture that inspires courage, where leaders and the organization make bold growth moves – creating safe experimentation spaces, valuing improvement ideas, championing customer experience and balancing purpose with profit. Courage is part of your personal character but it is also part of your corporate character, and thankfully it is possible to build it.
Courage is a very powerful and engaging force in any organization. People love to follow brave leaders. It’s difficult to take a bold step into the unknown but that is what’s required if you are to lead lasting transformation. Don’t take it all on yourself. Take a deep breath and take people with you.
Interested to learn more about honing your leadership skills for the digital age? Get in touch.
Why Healthcare Must View Customer Experience as a Product
Drugs and devices matter less. Today’s patients look at care as an experience.
Leading organizations are no longer viewing customer experience as an add-on, but instead as a core product, and the healthcare industry has been slow to adapt. In an earlier article, I introduced execution-based barriers in delivering a winning customer experience. The first of those barriers are not viewing experience for any customer – B2B, patient, consumer, etc. – as a core product. Most companies that are not digitally native are guilty of this. They have locked themselves into how they operate or what they manufacture.
“They have gone beyond customer-centric and are customer-experience-centric.
If you ask the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies, health insurers, or health systems what their core products are, they will tell you drugs, plans, and care delivery, respectively. This is reinforced by their categorical descriptors, and that’s what their customers, investors, and the larger healthcare community want from them; pharma = drugs, payers = plans, providers = care. Now step outside of healthcare and consider everyone’s favorite “best company” for example, Amazon. Are they in the retail, logistics, or media business? The answer: it doesn’t matter. They build products around experiences. They have gone beyond customer-centric and are customer-experience-centric.
This Isn’t Another Sloppy Amazon Reference.
No one wants to read another naïve article about what healthcare can learn from Amazon, Uber, or Netflix. I want to make sure I bring this down into a very specific insight that all healthcare organizations can act upon: manage customer experiences as core products. The reason everyone raves about the experiences with the winning, digitally native brands is that each micro-moment is a product. Micro-experiences such as sign-up, sign-on, payment, and search are managed as discrete products with product teams of these famed digital brands.
Healthcare Organizations Are Already Skilled in This.
Most healthcare organizations have developed well-structured businesses around what they view as their core product. Insurers have a head of Medicare Advantage plans. Health systems have a head of neurosciences. Life sciences companies have a head of Diabetes Care. And they also have multiple product managers that report up to these leaders. While easier-said-than-done, these organizations need to deploy that same model to experiences, and declare experiences and supporting micro-experiences as products.
Equally important is how healthcare companies deploy product management teams. As new products become mature, scaled products, the product management teams behind them need to adjust. For healthcare leaders that haven’t kept tabs on modern product development, it has changed dramatically in recent years, as my colleague Tony Fross summarized.
Blending New Products With Legacy Products Is the Trick
Value from legacy products isn’t going away. Hospitals always need to treat sick people, pharma companies always need to invest in the next life-changing drug, and the opportunity to create new payment products seems endless. However, there is a difference between creating value and winning. All things equal, companies that focus on delivering great customer experiences within their competitive sets will be winners in the future.
Let’s take a quick look at the following three examples of healthcare organizations that are treating the customer experience as a core product:
Pill Pack: It’s not the world’s first pharmacy, nor the first one to leverage digital. What has accelerated its success is that the entire operation is centered around customer experience. Yes, the drugs themselves and logistics are critical, but they are wrapped-around an experience-first “product”.
Oscar Health: It’s nearly impossible to separate legal and regulatory policy from an insurance company’s performance. That said, Oscar Health has gone from 15,000 members in 2014 to 257,000 members in 2019 – even though its plan pricing and network coverage are nearly the same as established players, and even has fewer insurance products to pick from. Oscar’s rapid growth and continued expansion is based primarily around being “a health insurance company centered around the patient.” They even jokingly claim, “We didn’t create Oscar because we liked health insurance.”
Geisinger Medical Center: Not all best-in-class examples are start-ups. Geisinger’s money-back guarantee is a great example of putting the customer experience first. Over the past three years, the organization has refunded between $200,000 to $400,000. Roughly the cost of three billboards for a year. Yet, it rallies employees to ensure they are putting the patient experience first. Patients feel like they are treated as people, not objectives, and are more empowered and less anxious, which is unfortunately often the opposite in most hospitals. The “money-back guarantee” is one of many examples where Geisinger is treating customer experience as a core product, and why it’s one of the most admired health systems in the US.
When it comes to executing a customer experience strategy, healthcare organizations need to acquire new skills and expertise. Most health organizations have proven product management teams, sometimes called service lines or brand teams, but still maintain a highly focused approach to innovating and managing products. The critical shift is recognizing that customer experience is a product and should receive the same treatment, structure, and incentives as a legacy core product. Just as it’s being done in the companies transforming the world of healthcare as we know it today.
Breaking Down the Importance of the Exemplar Brand
Make building the subcategory the priority. The brand is just the vehicle for doing so.
A fourth big idea in the book Owning Game-Changing Subcategories is the concept and role of the exemplar brand in subcategory creation and management. To own a game-changing subcategory, a major task is to become its exemplar brand. An exemplar brand is the brand that represents the subcategory and becomes its most visible and credible brand option.
The Role of an Exemplar Brand
The exemplar brand has the power and authority to build the subcategory into a market winner. It has several jobs, which include:
To develop and evolve “must-haves” that will frame the way people view and evaluate the subcategory
To create visibility and credibility for the subcategory and use the “must-haves” to position it in the marketplace
To nurture the growth of a core customer base committed to the “must-haves” and the subcategory
To build barriers to competitors so that they will struggle to be relevant
In addition to building the subcategory, the exemplar brand will simultaneously be making the exemplary brand the most relevant subcategory brand. But it should be recognized that building the brand is a secondary byproduct of the effort to build the subcategory, which should be the priority. The brand is the vehicle to build the subcategory.
“Building the brand is a secondary byproduct of the effort to build the subcategory, which should be the priority.”
How to Become the Exemplar
So, how do you become the exemplar brand? It really depends on the context. Every subcategory story is different, but there are four guidelines that have proven successful.
Act Like One
First, to become an exemplar brand, act like one out of the gate. Promote the “must-haves” of your brand and use them to frame the conversation. Be the subcategory innovator and thought leader. Build subcategory loyalty. Do not sound like a “my brand is better than your brand” marketer. Rather, sound like you are introducing a game-changer, a new experience or relationship.
Successful exemplar brands like Warby Parker, Uniqlo and Tesla did exactly that. They made visible and credible “must-haves,” and created a core customer group that not only valued them but also talked about them to friends and family.
Scale, Scale, Scale
Second, scale as fast as possible even if that means taking financial risks. Aggressive scaling will create buzz and, more importantly, will build the core customer base that will support the initial growth platform and inhibit potential competitors. It is critical for the “must-haves” to get established. That might mean taking risks, overinvesting in “must-have” creation, refinement and promotion. It is not important, or even common, for an exemplar brand to be the first brand in the subcategory. It just needs to be the first to get it right and have the commitment, talent and means to scale aggressively.
Game-changing subcategories often can and should start as a crude test product. Airbnb started with two guys with air mattresses wanting to make some extra money to pay the rent. They were able to expand and refine their “must-haves” ahead of competitors.
Brand the “Must-Haves”
Third, brand the “must-haves” or the subcategory itself. For example, Uniqlo’s innovative fabrics have “must-have” brands like HeatTech, AIRism, and LifeWear. Airbnb branded its guest experience program “Airbnb Experience.” The success and power of Amazon is due in part to its branded “must-haves,” such as 1-Click and Prime. A brand signals that the innovation is worth a brand of its own. It also signals that the organization will support it and branding makes the communication task easier. That is what a brand does.
The subcategory itself could be branded as in the case of Asahi Super Dry, Dannon’s Light & Fit or Burton’s Snowboard (far better than Snurfer, its predecessor).
Build and Enhance Barriers
Fourth, keep building and enhancing barriers. Become a moving target. Don’t allow competitors’ openings to become relevant. Look to Amazon as a role model. In particular:
Reinforce and enhance existing barriers. Improve them. Make them visible. Energize them.
Add new “must-haves” over time to make the subcategory dynamic.
Create barriers involving “beyond functional” relationships like personality, values or higher purpose programs that connect with consumers and are hard to duplicate.
Own the “must-haves” by branding them and then actively manage and support those brands.
Play defense by delivering on the promise every time. Don’t give a competitor a route to relevance because customers have become less satisfied or even annoyed with some aspect of the promise delivery.
Exemplar brands are powerful game changers and the source of uncommon growth. By developing “must have” features, they can change the way consumers consider their purchases. And because they are new, they attract attention and build credibility.
Learning from the Leaders Behind the Johns Hopkins Capacity Command Center
Its work with GE Healthcare helped mix, filter and create real-time information from dozens of data streams.
When one thinks of innovation and healthcare business transformation, it’s often in association with young, West Coast start-ups founded in the 21st century. Rarely is an organization that was founded prior to 2000 regarded as modern and innovative. Not to mention one that was founded in the 1800s. That’s what makes the Johns Hopkins Capacity Command Center, designed and built with GE Healthcare Partners Group, so interesting. It’s a collaboration of two organizations, both over 125 years old, working together to create one of the most impactful healthcare innovations in recent years.
In this article, we go beyond how the GE Command Center at Johns Hopkins works and get into how it all started. Let’s dive into how the leaders behind the GE Clinical Command Center at Johns Hopkins Medicine have driven business transformation in healthcare.
Where It All Began
Soon after the Johns Hopkins Capacity Command Center went live, the Economist cited that “the biggest upgrades to hospitals are needed behind the scenes”—and went on to describe it as “a NASA-inspired ‘command center’ to manage its patient flows. Surrounded by 22 beeping flat screens, live video streams and lots of phones, staff members wearing headsets orchestrate the 1,100-bed institution around the clock.
GE Healthcare, a medical-technology firm, helped mix, filter and create new real-time information from dozens of data streams— in addition to designing the operating mechanisms, processes and even the physical space of the new center. Bed-planning has gone from an art to a science with the help of programs that predict demand with great precision and warn when a crunch is approaching.
Given the maturity of GE Healthcare and Johns Hopkins Medicine, and their ability to continually innovate, they classify as a “Transformer archetype” within the Evolved Healthcare Enterprise model.
Recently, I spoke with Jim Scheulen, Chief Administrative Officer, Emergency Medicine and Capacity Management, Johns Hopkins Medicine, and Jeff Terry, CEO GE Clinical Command Centers. Here are a few themes behind their partnership that made the Command Center possible.
It’s About the People Before It’s About the Technology
Jim and Jeff both agreed this initiative would not have gotten out of the gates if it wasn’t for the leadership from both sides. Jim highlights, “Johns Hopkins clinical and administrative leadership is very strong and forward-thinking, who see immense value in using sophisticated tools and analytics to run operations. It was never a question of ‘if,” but ‘when’.” Jeff added, “We were struck by the humility of Hopkins’ leaders, at every level. That translated to efficient interactions, which is key to moving forward at pace.And on the GE side of the house, the GE Healthcare leadership team provided broad success criteria and a budget. From there we had a safe space to innovate within.”
This is quite important to highlight, as many mature enterprises tend to be risk-averse and are slow to adopt the technology. It has little to do with the age of the organization, but the degree to which leadership takes a progressive view on running a modern enterprise. Second, we often see older enterprises holding onto an “operator approach,” micromanaging everyone’s activity instead of setting parameters and letting teams operate with autonomy, speed and agility. This is what makes a Transformer different than older enterprises that are “just hoping” to be more innovative but don’t follow through from a leadership or supporting operating model perspective.
Breakthrough Innovation Begins in Increments
According to Jim, “As a lot of these things start, the lightbulb didn’t just go off and we decided to build the command center. Roots started when we at Hopkins started to think that we should use simulation modeling, good data and statistical analytics for how we do our business. Running it in small bits at first.” Jeff adds, “From the GE side, we had been working on patient flow, access and throughput for about ten years with steadily increasing analytic capabilities. GE had explored something like this for the city of Rio de Janeiro and when we shared that with Jim and the Hopkins’ team it seemed like a very natural evolution of what they were already doing in small bits.” This is a huge advantage to Transformers. They often have a variety of low(er) tech solutions in place, acting as proofs-of-concept and allowing for these large, healthcare business transformations to be evolutionary from a risk perspective.
Patience and Speed Aren’t Opposing Forces
Many large, mature healthcare enterprises get into an “operations and optimization” mindset, and whenever an innovation opportunity comes along, there can be a knee-jerk reaction to ask, “What’s the cost? What’s the ROI? How long will it take?” Breakthrough innovation takes time and comes with a fair degree of uncertainty. Coincidentally, health companies are well versed in this, as most clinical products and services don’t come with quick ROIs. As Jim explains, “Johns Hopkins is comprised of financially smart people, not unfamiliar with long returns. We are a research organization and used to seeing returns take time; we had targets set and have hit our targets as planned since opening the command center.” GE Healthcare was equally prudent in making adjustments as they went, “We didn’t just jump in and constantly make changes,” Jeff added. “We focused on solving one problem at a time for caregivers, confident that this would eventually coalesce into an integrated software platform. And that’s exactly what has happened.”
Above all, Jeff underscored the importance of a common purpose.
“There is no doubt that at big companies there will be many agendas in play. The key to this effort was to stay focused on authentically helping caregivers, and almost ignore the rest.”
Keeping the purpose at the core of a healthcare business transformation is important, as challenges and new insights will emerge along the way. As Jim points out to others that take on serious innovation opportunities, “It will be more than you think it is, and its an adventure, requiring a lot of adaptation along the way. Something of this scale was first-in-kind work. It was hard. And the talented, hard-working people behind it all are able to make it fun, and something we’ll never forget.”
Jim and Jeff wanted to acknowledge some of their great colleagues who made this happen:
Ron Peterson, Judy Reitz, Mary Margarette Jacobs, Steve Mandell, Catherine Boyne, Alan Coltri, Jim Hainley, Damon Fisher, Bree Bush, Andy Day, Kathy Martin, Jim Livas, Manny Singh, Anne Cole, Ryan Treml, Ryan Mancl, Christine Peeters, Sreelatha Surendranathan, Pradeep Rai and Steve Verdi.
Ready to drive your business transformation forward? Learn more about Prophet’s services and feel free to get in touch today.
